Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China

27:40So Japan is doing quite well with all of this. So if you sum it all up, you can go to the Japanese use diplomacy to isolate their adversary with this UK alliance, they use all these psychological operations to promote revolution and desertions. They're using the military instrument to fund their rearmament and then they've got the economics going with all of these loans. The US military is really partial to a Reagan era acronym of DIME. You can see here that D is for diplomacy, ISR information, MSN Military, EAS economics sounds like a bad, I don't know, cheerleading routine. It's inadequate. It may be a place to start, it's cute and all that stuff, but cute does not mean complete.

28:25Think about it. One of the most important factors in this war, bar none, certainly for Russia, is railways. I don't see an R in there or anything. So by all means, this is better than only looking at military factors, but it's incomplete. YouTube shorts have been a really great tool for us for bringing new viewers to our main interviews. For example, if a guest is talking about a historical event, we'll take a snippet of the conversation and then just use the real archival footage to bring it to life. But when they dive into hypothetical situations, that can be hard to visualize. For example, I recently interviewed Stephen Cawkin about Joseph Stalin and Cawkin started this hypothetical dialogue between two Soviet era co -conspirators.

29:06And I come to you and I say, this Stalin guy, he's wrecking everything. We wanted to feel like you were really there in the room while this was happening. So we generated a picture of a Soviet official and we prompted Google's VO3 to have him say cockins line. This Stalin guy. He's wrecking everything. This was literally a one shot and it handled everything perfectly, including the pause. So we edited the video in and lip -synced it to Cochains line and I come to you and I say This Stalin guy He's wrecking everything we got to take him down Tri -view three on the Gemini app with Google's AI pro plan or get the highest access with the ultra plan Sign up at Gemini .google.

29:56Okay back to Sarah. So So I've talked about Japan's westernization, and I've talked about its master of grand strategy, and now here's my third reason of how they overturn the balance of power. And it has to do with pegging the culminating point of victory in the Russo -Japanese war. And now for commercial break, I'm going to give you some terminology, which are a commenting point of attack, a commenting point of victory. They're different. A commenting point of attack is an operational term. If you do not reach your accompanying point of attack, it means you could have gone further. And it applies, the accompanying point of attack applies to a single battle or a set of battles, which would be called a campaign.

30:40So if you don't go far enough in your battle, you could have taken more territory whatever it was you were after. If you go too far, so imagine you're going deep into whatever territory it is, your lines are ever more extended, your enemies' lines are probably being shortened. Your supply problem are getting worse. There's might be getting better. If you go way too far, the enemy will launch a counterattack that will send you much further backwards than if you've been a little more cautious about how far you went. So that's an operational term. The strategic term is a commenting point of victory and it concerns the objective for which the war was fought.

31:16Japan's fighting this war in order to protect its sovereignty. They come a great power to do that. If you don't go far enough and if you don't reach your culminating point, you could have gotten greater winnings. If you go too far, typically what will happen is you will trigger a third party intervention. And what may have been feasible before that third party, join the party, may no longer be. So this is the point of the terminology. A commercial great, because over and let's get going on the Russo Japanese War. Here's a nice map of it. So it starts out with a Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur, a Lucian modern name, a music traditional name.

32:00It's on the Laudong Peninsula. This is the main Russian base. The Japanese have to get those ships in base and sync them even better because their supply lines are in danger if that navy's out and about. Simultaneously, they land in army and Korea that's going to go northwest into Manchuria. If you look at the railway line, it goes Port Arthur all the way to Harbin up there. That's the East West junction of the Trans -Siberian Railway. Those days, that's the Chinese Eastern Railway. I've only listed a couple of the major battles, but basically, it's going up the railway system from Port Arthur upward.

32:39You've got the Laoghan and Mook down. And Japan has got only four armies until the very end of the war when it gets a fifth. And one army, as long as Port Arthur has ships in it, it has to be stuck there besieging it. And Japan's theory of victory in this thing is to have an annihilating battle. That's what Bismarck had done to the French and the battles to Dan. And so the Japanese really need to get that army out of Port Arthur so that it can concentrate on these other battles. What happens is Russia keeps losing the battles, but it has an orderly treat moving ever further northward extending Japanese lines.

33:17So that's an overview of how the war goes so you can orient the rest of the conversation here. If you look at the invasion routes that Japan uses in the first Sino -Japanese war and the Russo -Japanese war, they're remarkably similar because guess what? The geography hasn't changed. And so if you want to send an army in to desired locations, it may well have to take similar routes. And the British, the French, the Americans, Japanese had studied very carefully the first son of Japanese war. But apparently the Russians didn't waste their time on it because here's what's up. If the Russians had studied it carefully, they would have known the Yalu River is lethal to send an army across that that if there's an army waiting for it on the other side, the Russians also would have realized that this feng shui pass and the moi ten pass, moi ten means literally scratch the skies, that if you're prepared there, you're gonna ruin an army coming through.

34:17Of course, the Russians aren't prepared there. And then they also would have known it, the Lao Dung Peninsula, it has a very narrow neck. If you cut the narrow neck, which is right where Dalmi is a big commercial port, you're gonna get that port, which is connected to the railway and you're gonna be able to supply your armies going right up north. In addition, it means you're probably gonna get Port Arthur the big naval base as well because it's basically been turned into an island and you'll probably get that. So the Russians should have figured out that they, but the Japanese literally blast through these locations and here's the key to reducing the fleet in Port Arthur.

34:53Since the Russians wouldn't soar tea, they're just sticking in harbor. So the Japanese have to figure out a way to do it. Here's how it works. They have to get a bunch of these 11 inch howitzers in place, Japan didn't own many of these. They're really heavy. It's really hard to transport them with horses and things. They've got to put them behind the hills in Port Arthur. And then they've got to take the high point, which takes them all to figure out than they needed to do. This is 203 meter hill. You put a spotter on 203 meter hill. This thing starts firing shots, and the spotter starts radiating in how you have to adjust the line of fire in order to hit the ships in harbor.

35:30So that's what's going on here. Here you can see the narrow neck there above. Down here you can see it's a big port. We put a lot of ships, but not a very protected port. Now the star is where port Arthur is and that is a protected port where you want to put naval vessels. And you can see it takes the Japanese two months to work their way down the Liao Dung Peninsula to get themselves in position to blow away the ships in port. Meanwhile, Japanese armies are having a hard time while this is going on. It could be argued that maybe they even reached their common point of the pack in the battle of Liao Yang.

36:05Who knows? Liao Yang takes place less than halfway through the war. It's an early September 1904. And Japanese munitions, numbers of officers, numbers of horses, it all goes critical. They don't have enough. They get away with it. They win the battle, but the Russians have an organized retreat northward. And at the Battle of Shacho, which happens next in October, the Japanese supply system almost collapses, but they get away with it. And so bad things are going on at land. Japan doesn't have an infinite supply of soldiers. So you can also look, they don't have an infinite supply of artillery, howards, and things.

36:45Here are their gun emplacements. Notice the green ones are army guns in place and surround Port Arthur. That makes sense. What's all the purple? They have so few guns. They're pulling them off ships in order to reduce Port Arthur. And all these things they really need up in Manchuria. They need no gate, General Noge, who's running all of this, his army up in Manchuria. And there you can see the circle is where 203 meter hill is, that they need to take that as well. All right. So General Noge, who is commanding the Third Army, which is in charge of the siege, he is really desperate to take to reduce the fortress as soon as possible.

37:22And he runs four different really costly infantry assaults on a fortress, or you're killing lots of Japanese young men. And he chose them the first to occur right prior to major battles, Lao Yang and Shah -ha respectively, because he wants to win those battles, win the Port Arthur, so that he can take his guns and troops to fight at Lao Yang and Shah -ha. Well, it's not to be because he loses both of them. The salts are insufficient. And it's only after the second one that he realizes the importance of 200 and three meter hill. The problem is, no -ge gets 45 ,000 Japanese soldiers killed doing this.

38:0545 ,000 soldiers in that day is an entire army. And I've already pointed out that Japan only had foreign armies until the very end of the war when it tries to cobble it together. A fifth one. Here's what 203 meter hill looks like from down below. Here's what it looks like from up top to view you get. When there was a truce in early December 1904, and there were some talking between Japanese and Russian officers, Russian officers said, you will never capture 200 -3 meter hill to which the Japanese officer replied, we'll purchase it in blood, and they did. And their gamble paid off because all these ships, you'll notice they're listing.

38:42It's because they ain't sailing anywhere. The 200 -3 meter hill, they take it the end of November, and within the week they are now sinking all of these battleships, and they're gone with a few days. and the Russians give up at Port Arthur, and the third army is up and setting into Manchuria, where it'll be there for the Battle of Mookdown, which is a huge battle. It's got what, 500 ,000 troops, but even so, Russia can muster 125 ,000 more troops than Japan can. Japan in this battle is just taking anybody, young boys, old people, whoever they can put into that army, they're putting into it. And you could argue that they're well beyond their commenting point of attack but for incompetent Russian strategy.

39:31If the Russians had run one more battle against the Japanese, their Japanese supply lines would have collapsed and it's unclear how far down the Ladov Donk Peninsula they would have had to retreat. So this is when Japan's war termination plan goes into effect. The Japanese realized, in the very beginning, that they had a high -risk, high -reward strategy, and in contrast to World War II, they had a really carefully prepared exit strategy. So in Prime Minister Ito Hira Bumi is convening the cabinet, and they're going to make the decision to fire the first shots in this war. He has already lining up a Harvard grad.

40:12I hear of this count Kaniyekko who was an acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, then President, and what they want is to have this count Kaniyekko work on getting Roosevelt ready to do mediation at the end of this war. And the peace treaty is going to be held in negotiating to be held in Port Smith, no Hampshire, negotiated by another Harvard alumnus, Baron Camura, who is going to do all of that. Meanwhile, Eto sends his son -in -law as a diet member, but also a graduate of Cambridge University off to Britain to keep the Anglo -Japanese alliance solid. So the Japanese are very aware that you've got to have it away out of this thing.

40:54So it's in the battle of Mukden that Phil Marshall Yamagata decides it's time to call the American card at this moment. He said, look, the amnemies never going to request peace unless we have invaded Moscow or St. Petersburg, something he knows to be impossible. And he doesn't assess me. So look, the enemy cell has powerful forces in its home country. We have already exhausted ours. Second, while the enemy still does not run out of officers, we have lost a great number since the opening of the war and cannot easily replace them. At this moment, the Russian army was three times the size of the Japanese army.

41:29And that army in theater was increasingly comprised of crack soldiers, not the kind of colonial kind of soldiers they'd started out. with. And so this here's the field marshal Yamagata who in the first sign of Japanese war because the government in Tokyo was afraid he was gonna march on Beijing and do regime change. They pulled him out of theater and gave him a syndicate to make sure he didn't do that. This time he's a wiser man. He goes, we must now be prudent. And here are other members of this brilliant Meiji generation, the chief of staff of the Manchurian Army. He said, look, if you You start a fire, you gotta put it out.

42:09And here is the Field Marshal Oyama, who is the commander of Manchurian forces, but before he sets out to take command, he tells the Navy minister, I will care for fighting Manchuria, but I'm counting you as the man to tell me when to quit. So the Navy is gonna be the fire department apparently. To tell you what the Navy was up to, they took Ellie and Island to turn it into a cruiser base, and that's how they're running the blockade operations on Port Arthur of keeping being the Russian fleet in until they can eventually sink it there. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy is busy laying minds.

42:42A lot of ships go down to mines. So this is an interesting story. So Nicholas II's RR Russia doesn't much like it that his fleet is just sitting in port not doing anything. And so he sends Admiral Makarov out there to assume command. And I've had the misfortune to read Makarov's major literary contribution, which is all about naval strategy. And he's a real hero in Russia, but then I read his book as unbelievable. If you face a big ship, what do you do? A more powerful ship, you attack. If it's a smaller ship, what do you do? You attack. It's like, okay, one size fits all. I mean, how unanalytical.

43:18Here's what happens to him. He comes in theater and within the month, another spoiler alert, he's dead. How did that happen? He followed his strategy. That's how it happened. What he does, he arrives. Everyone was really excited because he's getting the guys out and thinking they're going to be doing things but on April 12th the evening before he dies There are a bunch of Japanese ships laying mines out of the harbors entrance and he mistakes some for Russian ships and tells us people don't fire on them Oops, and the next morning when he sorties with the whole fleet to be part of his We're gonna it's always take the offensive while they didn't sweep the harbor insurance for mines his ship He hits a mine and he goes down with a ship.

44:01All right, that is a tactical error. He's a dead man because of it. However, there's a much more strategic error that follows. Two weeks later, Nicholas II decides to send his Baltic fleet, named for the Baltic. That's where it is. All the way around to come and relieve the siege at Port Arthur in order to avenge all of this thing. Okay, what's the problem with that plan? Well, that's the problem with that plan, right? It's a long way to go. There is no air conditioning for the sailors, right? They come from northern climbs. By the time they arrive there, mutinous, their ships are covered with barnacles, which means they don't move very fast.

44:45Meanwhile, once Port Arthur has fallen, the Japanese immediately reshipped their navy, so they're good to go. And so the way this blunder plays out, Well, if you think about Britain, Britain will do these worldwide adventures, but they had a complete basing system across the globe so that their ships had cooling stations, they could refit, put more water on, give people some R &R time, relaxation and things. And also the British were very careful to fight on their own terms at ever possible. You don't wanna fight on the enemy's terms. Well, guess what? You're going to be fighting right next to Japan, barnacles, ships, and mutinous crews.

45:29That's not going to go well for you. And the Japanese know because now that Port Arthur falls while this expedition is taking place, so then the purpose of the expedition is no longer there. They should have taken a U -turn and go home, but no, no, no, they're going to keep on going. So there is only one other possible location for them, which is an inferior base up of a lot of a stock. So the Japanese know there are three ways to get to Vladivostok if you're coming up from the south You're thinking of the long long way around through the Peru's straight and it's awfully narrow and it's long way around You can go through the Sugaro's straight, which is a little wider But it goes by a bunch of big Japanese army bases and also a very large part of Hakodate You want to do that?

46:12That's kind of risky So the short way is to go through the Korea straight, which is broken in the middle by the Tsushima islands and the Tsushima Strait is to the east. It's 20 to 25 miles wide at its narrowest point, and that's the short way, which is what the Russians take. And guess what? They have a welcome party there of all these newly refitted Japanese ships that know exactly what they're up to. And the battle of Tsushima is one of the most lopsided naval battles in human history. The Japanese just either sink or commandeer basically the entire fleet proving the Russians had no idea of how to do naval strategy that the Navy had been a product of a bunch of aristocrats who the one who ran it was a guy who was known for what was it fast women and slow ships.

47:07It did not work out well for them. All right, while the negotiations are being held on whether to hold negotiations, President Roosevelt suggested the Japanese that they try to take Sohlin Island. You can see the tip end of the Japanese home island, Tukido, and then there's Sohlin. Why? Because it's much more valuable to the Russians than the Japanese. It'll be a good trade -back item in the peace negotiations. Because for Japan, it's a nice fishing ground, but for Russia, it's sovereign Russian territory, horror, is seeding that sovereign Russian territory to anyone, let alone an Asian power given the prejudices of the day.

47:42All right, just sum up what Japan got out of this war. It got its immediate war objective, Russian troop withdrawal from Nigeria. That's what they wanted. And they get this Japanese sphere of influence in Korea. That's what they wanted. But guess remember at the very beginning, they wanted to trade Japanese predominance in Korea for Russian predominance in Nigeria? Whoa, well, so what they really got, they got the southern half of Saunhlin Island, Russian territory. They got southern Nigeria. And it's actually arguably the valuable half, the southern half, because that has poor Arthur and Dalmi and all the railways that Russian had invested there.

48:21And then it confirms the outcome of the first Sinow Japanese War that Japan is indeed the dominant power of Asia. So I rest my case, Japan did it. Smart decisions in Japan is what overturned the balance of power in Asia. Okay, but I promised you a counter argument. What would a smart person say who disagrees with me? And here's a perfectly good counter argument, which would say, yeah, it's great you think the Japanese are so clever. But actually, China faced a perfect storm of catastrophes and because China imploded, that's why it leaves Japan on top in Asia. The primary factor is that China's falling apart.

49:05And this perfect storm of problems, I'll go through three. It's always a good number of people can remember three things. Talking about the civil wars afflicting China, that in an age of accelerating European imperialism, and also the manchews who ran China, they're only 2 % of the population, were suffering from all kinds of dynastic decline, which I will get into. China had reached its pre -industrial limits to growth. Its population kept on going up and up, but its agricultural predictivity just could not feed people. And so people are trying to farm really marginal lands. Either they're too vertical, they don't have reliable rainfall, and you're getting massive soil erosion doing these things, and you're also getting a lot of famines.

49:49And famines are both the cause and the effect of civil wars. And this map you can just see, I've named some of the big rebellions on this one, it's to give you a sense that these rebellions affect all of China. not. Not just a little here and there, but a lot of everywhere. And I'm now going to give you a table, and this is a simplified table. It only goes 1845 to 1895. It's part of a much bigger table that would cover the entire 19th century, and that table is an oversimplification. So the point is, this is not business as usual. In the red box, that is the height of these rebellions, 1851 to 1878.

50:27The biggest rebellion in there is the Thai pings. It's estimated that 20 million people died in the Thai ping rebellion To put that figure in perspective and people don't know how many people died and all these things It's trying to didn't know how many people they had much less how many people they lost But it to give you a sense that in world or two it's estimated that 55 million people died So you're trying 20 million just to the Thai pings and I have no idea how all this adds up But it's huge the Chinese like to talk about these as being rebellions are up for eyes and give me a break They're civil wars.

50:58A whole bunch of them want to overthrow to dynasty in Beijing. A whole other set of them want to succeed from the empire, often these minority people who just want the Han, the predominant people to go away or the Manchus in this era. So some of these provinces are devastated for generations. Okay, so that's point one, these civil wars. Point two is this coincided with an era of accelerating European imperialism, where Europeans and also the Japan Japanese are carving out massive spheres of influence for themselves. So the Chinese are not going to have sovereignty over their country, full sovereignty for a very, very long time.

51:41And the story, the worst part gets even worse. This happens to China because China loses a succession of regional wars. It loses the first opium war, the second opium war. The Japanese snag the Ruku island And then in the Sino -French War, China loses control over Indochina. And then in the Sino -Japanese War, they're losing their tributary of Korea. The Ely crisis is up in Xinjiang, goes a little better for them. This is a mess. This is not business as usual. This is, think about one country being afflicted by this much trouble. And then it comes at a time when the Manchus are in real trouble themselves.

52:21They had ridden to power on these fabulous cavities and tremendous operational success for people who are only 2 % of the population that they dominate and they transform China into their richest polity around the globe by the 18th century. But here's the problem with their tremendous success in their military campaigns. They're overextending China financially. Inside the round circle there, that's China proper. These are the core provinces of China that produce all the income, but the Manchus came in for Manchuria up there But they also take Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. There is that cost I'm not Manchuria so much, but the other ones they cost a lot of Garrisoning it costs a lot of money to garrison these places and so it looks like a great success, but it's gonna have problems later on And then here's what happens to the Manchu Amporers.

53:19They no longer ride at the head of their armies. The Chen Long Amporer, who's considered to be ruled at the height of the dynasty, what's he spending his money on? All sorts of interesting architectural programs, and that's why people think he's great, Bill's beautiful things. But these Amporers are isolated. They don't have command, experience, expensive spending habits, and then it gets better. So they got all these tributaries. some of their tributaries produce really high quality opium. And the Ampers decide they want to sample the goods. And the people who are preparing it for them also want to sample the goods.

53:55And then the Manchu, Banner forces that are the Praetorian guard of the Manchus are also sampling the goods. And then you go, why are the last Qing Ampers incapable of producing offspring or have it hardly any, because they got huge heroms. So what's their problem? Well, if you're really totally high on drugs, you can ruin yourself. And so that is what goes on. Now, wonder they're losing these wars. If some of your key thinkers are not thinking very clearly. So the counter argument, to my argument, says, look, it's nonsense. I mean, the Japanese may have been really clever, but this is the real big event.

54:34Is this massive series of civil wars? European imperialism and the collapse of my men's shoe, my minority rule. That would be the real thing. Now, if I leave my argument here, I've just shot myself in the foot because I've just decimated my original argument with a pretty good counter argument, and that would be bad. That would hurt. So you need to do a rebuttal. And it's really good to come from an unexpected direction. So I'm going to try my direction, which is going to be Russia and say, look, Russia is the catalyst. It's taking advantage of the collapse of China. And it's going to catalyze things in a way that Japan is going to leverage and it's going to be Japan leveraging these things that prove that smart decisions in Tokyo answers the question.

55:24So what's going on with Russia? Russia has always tries to expand its territory. It is today the largest country on the planet. Why they need more territory, nobody knows. But that's what they're after. And in these days, what they're taking are those two large areas. And by the time the Bolsheviks finished working their magic, Russians have taken from the Chinese sphere of influence, the Bolsheviks are beyond today. But it gives you a sense. They took more territory from Chinese sphere of influence than the United States, east of the Mississippi. This is a lot of territory. But in this day, while the opium wars are going on, and while the Typing and Nyan rebellions, the two big ones are happening simultaneously.

56:08The Russians go to the Ching and say, hey, we'll deal with those foreigners for you, we'll be in an intermediary, but just sign on the dotted line for these treaties, giving us all this land. And the Chinese were vague on geography, and they didn't believe in treaties. I thought they'd get it back later. So Russia gets all this stuff. Does exactly nothing because we know about the treaty port system and the British and France got all of it. and Russia got this stuff too. Once Russia gets this stuff, that's why they want the railway because they want to integrate it in there. So the Trans -Syberian Railway is the blue thing, but understand that the blue part that's above the green part, that wasn't built until World War I.

56:43Russia builds the green part, which is the Chinese Eastern Railway, the name of it, in order to stake out its plans for empire. And also notice it wants the warm water port, that's the orange part going down to Port Arthur because Vladivostok, prior to the age of ice breakers, is frozen solid several months of the year. So Russia's building is railway. Save on construction costs is more direct going straight across Manchuria. Contain Japan, stake out its claim to Manchuria. The Japanese get it, right? Well, that was earlier in this lecture. They see this coming and they don't like it. And then, in addition, what's going on, And the Chinese don't particularly like all the imperialists messing with their country.

57:28And so the boxers is another rebellion. And these folks want all Westerners out of China and they want to kill any stragglers. And they go into, they're all over China. They go into Manchuria and the Russians send 100 ,000 troops far more than any of the European powers or even Japan sends a lot to the rest of China to get the, to defeat the boxers which they do. And then the other Westerners in Japan remove their troops, Russia doesn't. And this is the thing that gets Japan's attention because Russia's got 100 ,000 troops in Manchuria that won't leave. And that's when Japan is sick of Russia procrastinating.

58:10And we're going to wind up getting into the Russo -Japanese War. So guess what? We're back to my original explanation, right? The Japanese finesse all of this, and they wind up on top, and it's by being very thoughtful in their grand strategy that they reverse the balance of power. So I'm going to end this thing with General Nogi. General Nogi is the one who oversaw the four assaults on Port Arthur. He lost both of his sons in this war, one in the Battle of Nanshan, which is down the lad on Peninsula, and then his other, his favorite, under his command in Port Arthur. When the war was over, he asked the Meiji Emperor if he could commit ritual suicide, and the Emperor said no.

58:59So when the Meiji Emperor died, he and his wife did. And this poem helps explain why. Imperial troops, a million strong conquered, an arrogant enemy, but siege and feel warfare left a mountain of corpses, ashamed. what face can I show to all parents? How many men have returned this day of triumphant song? Wars bring much sorrow. And so I leave you with that, and thank you very much for your attention. I loved this lecture especially, and this topic especially, because it's about a conflict that many of us weren't educated on, but adds context to the other ones which are obviously super famous, like World War II, as context to the development of these powers which are the most powerful in Asia.

59:50So I'm not gonna keep wasting time. I just wanna jump into asking you a bunch of questions about this. Okay, one way you can explain Russia's loss here is that Japan had better tactics. And so given the fact that they had deployed similar amounts of men to the front, Japan with their better tactics was able to win in these different battles. But maybe the more important thing to explain is why Russia didn't deploy more men or didn't deploy its greater resources Russia's population is over 130 million people at this point Japan's is 47 million or so well you might say it's the trans -sibular and real reason completed by this point But in 1905 it actually is complete and so Russia Could have continued the war it has all these fresh troops it could send And so then the question is why didn't they have the same will to or the same ability to muster resources?

1:00:41There are massive resources that Japan brought to bear. Well, one is the real way is a bottleneck. Japan's starting the war deliberately before while that bottleneck is bottled. So that's one factor. Russia has massive troops. Also the Russians are arrogant, right? They think Japanese. Initially, the Russians think they're going to do regime change in Tokyo. That's their plan. How they plan to get to Tokyo is a mystery, but never mind. And so they don't realize what they need. It's a fairly common problem. In wars is gross underestimation of the other side, right? That's what's going on in Ukraine right now.

1:01:23Putin missed that one. He's not the only one, right? Hitler underestimated the Russians in World War II. And then you go, oh, why is everybody what's going on with Japan? And it had a really those major reforms. They have an educated population. Russian soldiers are a bunch of illiterates. And the Russian soldiers are going, what, why are we fighting in Manchuria? Tell me precisely why I'm here getting killed. The Russian soldiers had no buy -in. And you can ask what exactly did the Russians want there? Apparently there were some royal favorites who thought that they were going to get some lucrative timber concessions on the Korean border.

1:02:06Okay, let's go into logistics. I've never heard there was a shortage of wood in European Russia ever. Then they're going to ship it all the way back. This is a non -performing economic model. In addition, Nicholas II is an incompetent czar. He's hiring the guy who's running the Navy is also incompetent. Their Navy gets no training whatsoever. So great, you have extensive ships, but no one's trained in how to use them, whereas the Japanese have. And the Japanese, it's the value of the object, one of these concepts. How valuable is it to win for Japan versus Russia? Well, for Russia, it's already the biggest country in the planet, and there's nothing really that exciting out in Asia from their point of view.

1:03:01Maybe for Nicholas, because he wants to be a great czar and add to the empire, that would be a nice thing. But when the Germans come after him in World War II, World War I, I think he's going to care about the other things more. So that's one for the Japanese, rightly or wrongly, their government and educated people consider it existential. And they're looking at China going, that's our future if we don't fix things. And they're thinking the solution for Japan is empire because in those days, that seemed to be the way powerful countries ran things. So it's a combination of a legitimate logistical bottlenecks.

1:03:40Japan is, since they're going to be starting, it's seeing massive preparations, the Russians aren't planning to fight this thing. They're thinking that I determine when the war began, whether war's began or end. Excuse me, they don't. So I guess you're saying Russia doesn't care about this conflict as much as... Russians, Zarnicalist might, but his population is fighting it. So then he doesn't have the state capacity to mobilize his... Oh, that's the whole problem with Russia. Okay. This is the power of institutions. Japan clearly can mobilize. Boy, is it doing well with the loans and all sorts of things?

1:04:14It's using these institutions. Whereas Russia, memory doesn't have a legislature. The Zara doesn't have a cabinet in the sense, he has ministers, but they don't ever show up at his house at the same time to sit around a table. He's just doing them one at a time. And then the Romanov family have lots of first cousins, right? You got everybody's having lots of kids, and so you got a million first cousins. and they are all deployed throughout the ministries basically being the spy system for the Romana family of what's going on. Are any of these nice rich boys particularly competent? No. I wanna understand, World War One, they are able to mobilize many more men.

1:04:59They obviously, there was incompetence in World War One as well, but like the sheer amount of resources that the Tsar was able to bring the burden of the war to the Far East during this conflict. Look at a map and you'll see the railway grid is much more extensive in European Russia. And this is where Count Sergei Veta, their finest minister of lights, R .S. period, he's the one who's doing, trying to do his version of a major restoration in his purview, which is the finance ministry, financing all these railways. So there are many more railways, and this is where Russia's population is. This is where their historical security threats come from, and Russians can get on board with protecting European borders.

1:05:37What's the Trans -Siberian Railways finished in 1905? Just a part of Manchuria. It's not the one that goes on their side of the boundaries, not completed until World War I. I'm excited to announce my new sponsor, Hudson River Trading. They're a quantum that accounts for around 15 % of all US equities trading volume. And almost all of this trading goes through their deep learning models. But predicting market movements is just insanely hard. You have to deal with imperfect information, all kinds of hydrogenous data, with minuscule signal noise ratios, and impossibly tight latency constraints. And if this weren't enough, you were in this arms race against some of the smartest people in the world who are continuously training their models against the data that you output.

1:06:24Because of this, HRT has built their internal AI team like a frontier lab. They've aggregated trillions of tokens of market data across every asset class and invested in a massive cluster of B200s, and they've built up an exceptional team of researchers to do fundamental ML research. Honestly, in terms of AI, the big differences between them and a frontier lab is that, well, one, HRT is very profitable, but two, their engineers and researchers not only have to make their models perform at scale, but also have to battle -test them in this insanely adversarial environment. If you want to join them, you can learn more at hutsandrivertraining .com slash the war cash.

1:07:07Okay, back to Sarah. I want to double click on what part of the major reformation exactly helped Japan mobilize for this war because, okay, the poppy line edition is literate. You have institutions for having political say, but like how exactly does that help you have more people go to the front? I don't know the answer, but I know it. Japanese, I mean, talk about a culture that's about detail, about hard work, about service to the emperor, right? I've done in your earlier podcast series, a whole series about Bushido, that they're imbued with service to the emperor, and that if you go in wars, you win them.

1:07:52And so that's part of their culture. Now, Russians also don't like being messed with when people invade them, but this time they're invading other people in an irrelevant part of the empire. And it's at a time when Russia is trying to industrialize itself, but they haven't put enough money into their education system. So they have a bunch of illiterate troops running around. And let's face it, how can you read any of the manuals or do anything? Oh, we had some of their generals. One of them didn't know what a howitzer was, one of the guys who's planning stuff. And he can't read maps. The level of incompetence of having royal favorites in your officer corps, well, they make these decisions.

1:08:33Also, there's split command in the Russo -Japanese war. So there's General Kuropaten, who is the professional, who's actually had fought in the Ottomans. But those are colonial wars. He'd won some of those. He's a professional. but then Admiral Alexei of who's the ill of genimit son of I camera which is our and favorite uncle I believe of Nicholas the second he's out there and no one knows who's actually in command except the royal favorite is probably the better bet and so Kuro pot can wants to not engage the Japanese until there's way inland because he wants to extend their lines and then clobber them and all these aristocrats and I don't know what they're talking about so no No, no, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna let these racial and fair ears do whatever we're gonna take them on immediately.

1:09:23Well, okay, try that. Kuropai can strategy probably would have worked. Just bring them on in and let them enjoy, like Napoleon Bonaparte. You wanna get to Moscow, have at it. Then try winner in Moscow. One really just take away from this lecture. And I'm curious if you agree with this, is when we think about this period in history, we often think of Japan as the rising power in Asia. Yeah. But it seems like they take away here is actually Russia was on the path to be the dominant power here. Their population is so much bigger. If the efforts to modernize worked, they would just have a four X bigger population, but then they could have had the modern industry Japan has.

1:10:02And so we're not later on for obviously for the the Bolshevik revolution and the Civil War and collectivization. Russia would be dominant in Japan seeing this acts early to. But so I I guess I didn't put it in those terms before I heard this lecture. Would you agree with that? Well, I'm going to give you a tangential answer then you tell me what I'm missing. The sorrow of Russia is here they have this incredible land, natural resources in the works. And they're really hung up on empire, on having lots of territory. They live in a difficult neighborhood. Vita is telling Nicholas, forget about the Asian adventures.

1:10:43we need to build more railways in European Russia, and he was right, because if they could have mobilized better in World War I, you might get some different outcomes. Also, you might have avoided the food riots in St. Petersburg, which is what topples a real lot of dynasty. If you'd actually provided enough food to St. Petersburg, maybe you don't have those riots, because you have the railways running in things. And so Russia is a story of misinvestment. Look at it today. If Putin had taken all of his oil money and invested it in the transportation grid, because believe it now Russia still does things by train, its road system are appallingly bad.

1:11:22And if Russia actually cleaned up its legal system, which under the ZARS it hadn't done either, everything is always royal monopolies. If they had cleaned up these things to allow individuals to make their own investments and make money, it would be a completely different story. But Azars couldn't stand merchants, communist hated them even more, and cultural differences, and then the Russians aren't known for being meticulous and hardworking the way Japanese are. Russians are known for it to be hard drinkers, right? And they're also known for being brutal. Let me take another different stab at your thesis.

1:11:59Sure, go for it. So it's not Japan's strategic brilliance, which mainly explains why they won the war. But rather the fact that Russia could have kept going even after the Baltic fleet is sunk, even after the Vlasenmuktan. But what changes is in 1905, you have this massive peasant revolution, you have mass strikes in the cities, you have Vladimir Sunday in January. So the Tsar's government almost collapses to the point that he has to at least give the perception of instituting major reforms. unclear whether it's going to work collapse. This is maybe a tangent, but when I had Stephen Cork in the Stalin -Barrion for on.

1:12:39Might know more about it. So it was, Japan cannot be claimed credit for the fact that there was these long standing issues in Russia, which almost brought down the government in 1905. This was a lucky break that they got, which forced Russia and the Zara to reallocate their efforts from the fight. It was to go to argument. It might be right. This is why I think Ken O 'Reilly will never get definitive answers because you'd have to be a Nicholas II's brain. It's an autocracy. What he decides matters. I dare say if he had been Peter the Great, the guy who tortured his only son to death and it suffered numerous setbacks, I doubt that he would have had any problems dealing with are rioting Russians.

1:13:29He would have figured out who are loyal units and then just blow away whatever is getting in his way. And he would have done his initial, his next battle. And when he won that battle, the Russian Revolution would have gone away because they would have gone see we did it. We got these people. So, but it's the, the, the, the, the, the, the conference argument is a very good one. But it's, to me, it's Nicholas Sassantan's and incompetent leadership is the bigger thing. And then you're arguing about how important is the rebellion and how deep rooted it is. And you'll never know, right? What this cock can be absolutely right.

1:14:06And I think this is a reason, one of the reasons I gave the counterargument is to get used to understanding ambiguity and appreciating that other people could be right and you may not know. And typically, I'm not sure if that's, I don't wanna put words in cocking's mouth. So I'll just put them in my mouth. I point to blame him for any errors I make. Okay, another thing that I think is super interesting in this period is it potentially helps explain why Japan thought that Pearl Harbor might work. Because superficially, these two situations seem similar. In both cases, you begin with this imminent threat that an adversary of yours is gonna gain massive military leverage over you.

1:14:53So in the 1905 for war with Russia, it's that the trans -Iberian railroad is finished in World War II. It's the worry that after Japan invades French into China, America does an oil embargo in Japan. That gives them one to two years of oil run away before their entire empire collapses and grinds to a halt about oil. So there's this worry that they have to act now. Otherwise they lose their, they're about to lose their leverage. And then there's this initial surprise attack, support Arthur in 1904 and then obviously for Harbor. And even if you look at other battles like Midway and Muckton, this is, we'll have this sort of annihilating battle where we will expend our blood and just push them back.

1:15:35Curious to get your take on this interpretation. One of them is, in both cases, Japan's seeing a window of opportunity, that I got to operate in this window and get it over with. and it works out, if you're doing that, that's a high risk strategy. They get away with it. And so this is back to the, that they were just lucky argument. Another thing is you can look at why certain wars turn out and another concept is a cooperative adversary. What's a cooperative adversary? It's not one that wants to cooperate with you, but it's one that doesn't play its cards remotely well. And if you can think about literally playing cards.

1:16:16If you're playing a game with a little child, they're trying to win, right? But they're a cooperative adversary because they just don't know how to play whatever the game is. And you could argue that Nicholas II is a cooperative adversary and that's required. And the United States is not remotely a cooperative adversary and it goes really badly for Japan. And then it's also, there's another piece, which is, when you run one successful war, quite often, you think it was easier than it actually was, and less risky than it actually was, like this country does Gulf one, where the allies pay for the whole thing, no Americans die hardly at all, loads of Iraqis die, they're out of Kuwait within days.

1:17:01I mean, wow. And then people are complaining we should have marched on the bag dead. Well, okay, we did that. That didn't work out so well. But then after you do one of these things and you think you're good to go and in Japan's case, between the two, a son of Japanese war and the Russo -Japanese war, it shifted the balance of civil and military power in Japan. And people thought that it's military officers. It did the right thing and that the diplomats lost the peace in the Russo -Japanese war. and we didn't get a big indemnity, like as we did in the last war. Well, you're getting the whole Russian railway system.

1:17:37That's an indemnity in kind, but that's not what they're seeing. So it shifts the balance of power. And then in addition, this May -G generation, the prime civil leader, Eto Hirabumi, is assassinated by a Korean revolutionary, because the Koreans don't watch like Japanese in their empire. So he dies, oh gosh, it's a decade plus, before Yamagata does. And so that gives Yamagata and military friends another decade to insinuate the roots of military institutions and civil institutions are not being built. And then you can go, well, look at the Japanese, they're incompetent because their institution building was inadequate.

1:18:19Well, in one generation, you can't do it all, right? Institutions take generations to really sink routes. So they did as much as they could in a generation, but their leadership was bereft compared to them. This is why the magey generation is truly a brilliant set of leaders and what comes after their children and grandchildren are not. But this is also another very important point. So the fact that the civilian leader of the magey generation dies before the military leader reinforces the contingency of history. It didn't have to be that he died first, but then that sort to change is potentially the whole trajectory of history.

1:18:57Yeah, individuals trends, the whole thing matters. And there's no saying. I mean, maybe if he'd stuck around it, everything would have been the same. He says you can't rerun the experiment. This is where again, counterarguments are useful on so many human endeavors, you just don't have complete data. Or, and maybe it's something, and when you're doing things in the here and now, maybe the data will come in a little later or it just doesn't exist, and yet you've got to make decisions. And so if you're not willing to change your mind, you're just gonna double down on bad decisions. And it's incredible the number of people who don't wanna change their minds.

1:19:32And that's why I made a big to do about giving the argument counter -marketing a rebuttal framework because I think it helps get you out of the rut so that you can change your mind. Like you're gonna tell me that Kotkin's got this thing and I'm wrong, I'm gay. Maybe he's right. I don't care who's right, I care what's right. But going back to the question of, okay, what exactly was different between the Rooster Japanese War and World War II, what was Japan's miscalculation? One of them has to be that in the case of Russia, they attacked an adversary that was, it took one year of conflict to push them to the point of significant destabilization of the government.

1:20:15Whereas, if you thought the same thing would happen to the America, we're going to attack Pearl Harbor and there's going to be all kinds of internal conflict and they just misjudge the internal level of cohesion and functionality of American institutions, right? They thought the same thing would happen in Russia would happen. You're missing the whole war. Their war is with China. Instead of isolating the adversary, they bring in a whole new slew of adversaries, right? They're having trouble with China. That's the second sign of Japanese war. We don't get all excited when we're involved, but it starts in 1931 and their objective soon becomes an unlimited objective.

1:20:49They eventually want to do regime change in China, whereas in the first son of Japanese war, Yamagata is thinking about doing regime change and the government pulls them out because it's buddy don't do that. We're going to have all kinds of foreign powers intervening if you try. And then in the Russo -Japanese War, they're not trying to do regime change in Russia, but in the second sign of Japanese where they absolutely are trying to do regime change. They get more and more frustrated. And then their solution to that one is to attack all the colonial interests in Asia. That's when Pearl Harbor happens.

1:21:19And then they were bringing us to British. And that brings the British Commonwealth, so it's Australia and New Zealand. They do significant fighting. And then the Netherlands. So it's a different event. I want to go back to the media reforms. firms. So the Iakura mission, which is sent to Frascha to understand what did Bismarck do right. I think it's funny because Sergey White who's the finance minister, 1892 and 1902, he models himself as Russia's Bismarck. He wants to do the kind of industrialization that Germany went through in Russia. And yet the major generation succeeds in Japan in doing this kind of thing.

1:21:58In both cases, there's an authoritarian government that wants to have this kind of top down reform. Why does it work in Japan, but not in Russia? Russia is just a phenomenal illiteracy rate. It's an empire, which I think gets in the way. If you look at how many non -Russian people they're trying to dominate, it's like they're perennially overextended, right? Because they're perennially occupying places that don't actually make them much money. In fact, they probably cost them more money to hang on to. And so they're perennially doing that. I believe that Japanese are known to be incredibly hardworking.

1:22:36I believe that Chinese are known to be very hardworking. I have never heard anyone say the Russians are known to be hardworking. Maybe I missed something. I've heard they're like artists and they have the Russian Ruska -Dusha. They're so, okay, great. I mean, that's like a big excuse to say, well, you know, we may fail at everything, but our soul is superior. So I think there are these other things that are at work. And in Germany, it's the center of Europe. It's a highly developed place. It already has high levels of literacy. There's a lot more to work with in Germany. And it already has a better infrastructure for Russia.

1:23:16It's huge when you're trying to build railway systems. Just enormous. And think about side -transparent. If you just took all that track, just length, put it all over European Russia. You really have something there. Yeah. Okay, so this is a quote from Sun Yatsun who was the first and short -lived leader of the Chinese Republic in 1912. He says, quote, we regarded the Russian defeat by Japan as a defeat of the West by the East. We regarded them Japanese victory as our own victory. Now we know that just 10 years prior, China and Japan had fought a war together. or we know that in 20 years, there's gonna be a brutal invasion of China by Japan, where millions of Chinese will die.

1:24:03So help me understand why during this period, at least the Chinese revolutionaries and reformers, it seems like Japan is the power to emulate. All right, well, first of all, he's the founding father of modern China. It's one of the few things that the Taiwanese and the PRC agree on, that he's the founding father of modern China and it's positive what they think about him. Remember when I told you on the Russo Japanese War, how they're paying for everything in Manchuria, that the Chinese actually thought that on that one, that it would be a good thing. Also, understand when the man choose Luz, it's in Chinese, the war is called the Qing Japanese war, Manchu Japanese war.

1:24:51So the Japanese are defeating the Manchus, who you may not particularly like if you're a Han nationalist. So you can relate to that. And the Japanese were not, well, they got in and out of that thing. And so I think that's the key. And the really, really, really ugly, brutal stuff is going to happen in the second sign of Japanese war, where the Japanese these do things that are unforgivable. The problem for the first Sinow Japanese war is it's detonating Confucianism. And so what's it gonna replace that with? Sonia Sen is gonna do nationalism and work it that way. But I think that's the big answer, but you're quite right that as things went on, as it sinks in, that Japan is the dominant player in Asia, because first you have a war and that's happened, but you're focusing on all your civil wars and other stuff.

1:25:50And it hasn't sunk in that this is not an exception. It's going to go on for a century. I suspected that it's gradual for the Chinese to get really upset about Japanese in particular. And it's what they do in the Second Sonor Japanese War. It's unbelievable. Because when they start losing, they get brutal. Yeah. Yeah, something that wasn't emphasized in the lecture, but seems quite important to explaining why Japan was able to be so dominant in this period is Despite the fact that it has a much smaller population than China. This time it's 400 400 50 million people Russia's under 30 million What's going on in Japan of major reforms?

1:26:31What specifically are they enabling and if you look at the fraction of GDP that China is spending on defense. The country has sort of imploded, so it's like less than 1%. Russia is also not spending nearly as much of its, you know, output on defense. Japan in the preceding 10 years is spending 5 % of output on defense, and in 19 to 4, is spending 10 % of output on defense. And so that ability to marshal, and it's a smaller place, but you can marshal the whole resource towards this defense effort. It seems like Very important to understand. It is, but there's another piece. China's not really a unified state in this period.

1:27:13If you think about what people's loyalties are, it's to province and place. It's not to the whole, China, I mean, they're all part of it, but it's to place and I give you an example. So China has three fleets and the ones that I've been talking about in use is the northern fleet. And in the Sino -French War, the southern food gen fleet or whatever it is, the southern one that's fighting in, well, it's in China in those days, it wants the northern fleet to come down and help them. The northern fleet says hellnell. So in the Sino -Japanese War, when the northern fleet wants the southern fleet to come help it, the answer is hellnell.

1:27:54And it also has to do with how are these forces being financed? Provincial governors are financing it. And so they want to use these forces for province. They don't want to send it out of province. And in the traditional world, where China is just worrying about some barbarians on horses way off and wherever, that works well enough because if they come riding in, you can probably eventually deal with it in province one. and it'll eventually work, but all of a sudden, these Western powers come, and then the Chinese very foolishly fight in the treaty ports, and when they should have done is said, hey, come on in 25 miles and see how you like it.

1:28:37All right, let's try 50, and the British would have had real trouble with that, and it's a real failure of strategy that they can just own. So they love to complain about the foreign, Chinese today about foreign imperialists, and they don't look at their own gross incompetence. What is it? This country, we're dealing with Britain. Britain's a lot closer to us than it was to China. Their population was larger than the American colonists. And George Washington and friends gave him a run for their money, right? The Chinese, what's the problem? They should have been able to deal with it. But it's a case of lacking leadership, lacking institutions, that these things matter, even have all the resources in the world.

1:29:19So this country needs to watch it. We may have all the resources in the world, but if we don't organize our Our cells appropriately or if we do a whole bunch of own goals with our own leadership, it will cause problems Talk about the long run institutional effects of history The which I just mentioned about the provincial government's controlling a large share of Chinese resources You go from that period as though I'm the Ditching dynasty then you have the republic, then you have the warring state period, then you have the Japanese in control of parts of the country, and then you have the communist, or a nationalist and then communist.

1:29:57Yeah, constant war. After five different regime changes, this dynamic in China, today in the US 50 % of output, like government spending is done by the federal level, 50 % is done by the state level. and in China, it's 85 % of the local level, 15 % of the national level, and a big problem recently has been the fact that the local government has financed a lot of construction that was economically valuable. But you can go back 100 years to this period, more than 100 years to this period, and the same problem of provincial governance still comes up again. Under the Qing, it was local areas had to finance all of the government.

1:30:40The central government didn't finance anything. Hardly anything. That was always a problem. It led to massive corruption because if you don't have a budget, then you have to do some way of getting graft or something from people to pay for things. This is enduring. It's a different institutional setup of how you're going to run things. institutions matter. They channel decision making, they channel how money canner can't be made. It's consequential. So part of the reason that Russia loses is that this is not the main priority for them. But if that's the case, before the word Japan produces agreement, which allow Russia to maintain their sphere of control over Montreal, Japan to maintain their sphere of control over Korea, and then Russia refuses this.

1:31:41And that's why Japan decides to do the surprise attack. Obviously, after the war, Russia is in a much more disband advantageous position. But do we understand why they were not game to consider this before the war? Because it's a gross underestimation of the enemy. They're thinking these people are a bunch of nobody's. And then Nicholas, the second he had an unfortunate incident in Japan, who knows whether this influence them or not. So he does the royal tour, right, while his dad's still alive. And he goes all the way around, winds up in Japan, and Samurai there, somebody tries to assassinate him with a sword.

1:32:18So Nicholas always has a scar up here. And so I imagine that didn't leave happy memories of the start of it. It is a pretty cool story though. I almost got a assassinated by a samurai and here's my scar. Yes Whatever anyway, that's what happened to him and but I think it's a disgrace It's it's the feeling that there's no need Right and it goes back to grossly underestimating other people on the problem with racism You know you think you're so special and other people are so unspecial wrong And then the Japanese are amazing think about it there on the group of seven of major economies, right? They are the, and it's major economies and major democracies.

1:33:02They're the only non -Western power there. And they don't get there out of charity. It's out of their own achievements. So, it's an enormous achievement. And what's tragic about World War II is that if they hadn't done that, people will be looking at the major reforms in order to model what they're gonna do to get over the hump and develop. And in fact, a lot of the things that Dungshiao Ping does in terms of investments in things, rhymes with Meiji reforms. And if you look at the four little tigers that originally Singapore, Hong Kong, and was a Korean Taiwan, whatever I'm missing, a lot of their development, it parallels in a lot of ways of what the Meiji reformers did.

1:33:48Well, these are Japanese ideas, but they're not getting credit for them because of the brutality of World War II, where you're thinking of that and thinking, well, if I say nice things about Japan, it's I'm endorsing this other stuff. No, they're two separate topics, different generations. I want to better understand the degree to which the level of technology in a country matters for its military capabilities. Because at this time, countries are just buying armaments from more advanced countries. So China in the 1894 war, China has bought two German battleships, many other vessels. Japan has no battleships.

1:34:29And then in the 1904, 1905 war with Russia, both Japan and Russia have British ships because of the alliance that Japan had with Britain and then Russia also has friendships. So if they're able to procure the most advanced weaponry from the West, does it matter what their level of technological development? Yeah, you have to learn how to use it, right? So it's, and you have to maintain it. The Russian had this fancy fleet that their aristocrats wanted to buy, so they're good at cutting checks. But they aren't doing any training on it. If you do numbers of days like days at sea for the Russians, it's laughable.

1:35:08And also it's cold, so that all winter no one's going anywhere. Whereas the Japanese are constantly deploying their forces and they're learning, doing all kinds of practice and things. So you can imagine if you don't do any practice, it's not going to go very well for you. But on the counter argument to this technology, is if the value of the object is high, and if you're like an intervening power messing in somebody else's country, it may not matter on the technology or it matters, but that these people will never give up. So in the American Revolution, the British had us in technology. It's incredible.

1:35:48They actually could supply in an age of sale and horses. They could supply things by sailboats and keep it going. But we were just totally infectious and we would never give up. And this is a problem with the United States in Afghanistan. Talk about a backwards place. Does get more backwards. Or Iraq is the locals just never gave up. They may not have the technology, but it's like it's our house and we want you out of here, we're never quitting. And this would be Russia's problem in Ukraine.

1:36:23It's going to go on. So technology is important, but also the value of the object. What is the relative value of whatever you think wind is? And if you look at, if you're in Iraq, it's a lot higher for you than it is for some American intervening there. Or if you're looking for or a Japan and empire. It's a lot higher for Japanese who are looking at China and thinking that's gonna be their fate. And maybe they're misidentifying the cure. That's a whole different matter. But that's what they look at it. Then for Russia, which is, who even cares? There's nothing this part of the world actually offers Russia, other than bigger, more lines on a map that looks bigger.

1:37:05Speaking of winning, after the war, as you mentioned, theodore Roosevelt mediates the peace treaty between Russia and Japan. And he wins the Nobel Peace Prize for this. At least one president gets one. And the treaty of Portsmouth is heavily criticized in Japan in the following years for not giving them the concessions they feel are warranted as a result of their victory. I don't think there's any reparations, there's many territorial disputes that don't end up landing specifically in Japan's corner. So potentially a lesson to learn here is that you should, if you give to relaxed piece terms, then the person who wins will feel aggrieved and they'll go at it again.

1:37:52Although the other lesson, if you have a treaty of Versailles where it seems that you should learn the opposite lesson, that if you have two aggressive piece terms, then the person who lost will come back and have this sense of being aggrieved. And this is a general problem in history, it feels like there's an equal and opposite lesson. Different types of war is one's a war for unlimited objectives, which is what World War I eventually becomes, we're trying to regime change all over the place, which is where as you're doing a limited war for Japan. Japan, you also, you have to have a feasible objective.

1:38:28If Japan had demanded war at those peace talks, Nicholas II would have gone back to war, and he would have slaughtered them, because he had all these cracked troops that are just sitting there in theater, and the Japanese literally don't have the men. So that Russia would, it's got three times the army now. It's there, and they can bring them in at 100 ,000 a month. And we just saw the Muktan, where the Russians had 125 ,000 more men than the Japanese. Well, if they can ship at 100 ,000 a month, wait a few months, and then it's gonna get really ugly. So it wasn't feasible. And there's another piece.

1:39:04So you're going to go fight a war. And then you lose a lot of people. And that's why the Japanese are feeling they should have gotten more. Because you've got General Nogi, who's committing suicide over this. And the poem at the very beginning I showed you, the Meiji Emperor, also has this feeling of sorrow. Is it, a war as you start losing. This is Putin's problem. He's lost so many people. He didn't feel sorrow. but he needs to get revenge that's equivalent to make up for that. So the longer these wars go on, the harder it is to stop them. And so on Jerez Say, it's a different story because there is an unwillingness to enforce the peace and there is also a feeling of particularly in France and also Britain to get really even with the Germans.

1:39:57and then the United States is an irresponsible power in those days where one of the reasons you get World War II has to do with the Great Depression, which is not strictly related to the Versailles peace term term term term the more that if you had another great depression, maybe the Versailles settlement would have been good enough. We'll never know. And one of the reasons a great depression gets so bad is because this country doesn't want to act as the lender of last resort, which is what Britain had done in the past, but it couldn't after World War I. It had been bankrupted. In our countries, you're responsible.

1:40:37These problems are on the other side of the sea and we think, okay, America first and whatever, and we're gonna raise tariffs and things, and all we do is tank the global system, whereas if you're the lender of last resort, you're gonna put money into the system as it's collapsing to prevent it from collapsing so that it can rebound. And that's why it's important to do that. Yeah, it's expensive, but it's a great depression is a lot more expensive. So there are different problems. Is there a lender of last resort today? Isn't that the problem? Well, that's what the IMF and things are about. But it used to be that this country was willing to take on these burdens of last resort, and in the area of nuclear weapons nuclear shield, right?

1:41:24And we're trying to shed these things right now. And we shall see, well, it'll, at bare minimum, it'll make us the, sort of, the irrelevant power instead of the essential power because Europe is going to reorganize itself and they have the institutions to do it and the United States used to be the leader of the West. Well, it's going back home to Europe. Europe is going to lead the West. They invented it. They're perfectly, they have an extensive set of institutions to do this and they're already starting to marginalize us by putting out feelers to set up trade agreements with Asian countries, with South American countries.

1:42:06It'll take them a while to do this. Once they do it, we will be on the outside of it if we don't change our minds. And they're going to get stronger institutionally. And what is it, Churchill said something about allies. The only thing worse than working with allies is working, trying to survive without them. that you're better off with lots of friends going after bullies in the world than you are by yourselves and we'll find ourselves by ourselves. Other countries have tried to tangle with China all by themselves. Japan did it when China was an undeveloped country. It did not work well. It didn't.

1:42:46You want to have friends when you do this, but we're making pivotal errors and we will pay for them. Maybe this is a subtle but recurring disagreement between us that has come up in different Q &A's is but I do want to I'm probably wrong. I could be wrong is that it seems like the quality of institutions is central in your thinking of how well a country will do a central would be in the future. And for me, it's much more like how big is your economy, me how big is your population? And so let me just finish the thought here. If you think that the center of, I don't know, the Western Alliance shifts to Europe, maybe you think like, oh, their institutions are good and that's why it will happen.

1:43:33But it seems to be America's just such a big and powerful country economically that it would be difficult for Europe to displace us, even if we make these mistakes in terms of our alliances and diplomacy. Well, let me ask you a question. Why isn't it that Argentina, which is a really big country, tremendous resources. Why isn't it a great power? It's economy sucks. I think it was because economy was better. I think it might be better. Yeah, but why does this economy suck? Excuse me, not my trusted words. But that is a result of mistakes in domestic policy with peronism, not with its mistakes in foreign engagement.

1:44:07Oh, okay. I agree that domestic policies matter a lot. Okay, but isn't, are we talking, perone is a populist leader. popularists by definition aren't people who are institutionalists. They're like me, I'm so special kind of person. And so aren't you actually telling me that Argentina has inadequate domestic institutions and they fail? Agreed. So on that institution, this is great because then we're identifying the real crop. So maybe the crux is, we both agree that institutions matter. I think they really matter because they shape the trajectory of economic growth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But I think like the sort of like their effects on.

1:44:43Right. Like, if you look at Russia, I mean, it allows the institutions, that place should be rich. But, so I think Europe's institutions are still bad because the rate of economic growth in Europe is quite bad. Whereas you think they might think they're better than I think they are. No, I think they're like good at diplomacy. I suspect that this crisis now, because it's existential with Putin, that it will force them to clean up these institutions. It will take them time. Maybe I'll be dead wrong. Or maybe it will be wrong, dead, who else? But that all works. But I suspect, because usually an existential threat is clarifying.

1:45:18And you can see Ukraine trying desperately to clean up its institutions. That's a lot further to go than Europe does. I suspect that Europeans are going to clean up some of this. And it'll take them time. It'll take them time. What they have to, because the piggy bank here, is no longer willing to fund their defense. And so there's merit in the Europeans needs to pick up the tab on their defense, and they should have done it earlier. Without it out there is merit to that. But the way we're doing it, where we're gonna cut ourselves out of the action, you wanna put the screws on, but you wanna also keep yourself part of it, where we're overdoing it in some fronts.

1:45:57And also you're doing it in such an insulting way. I'll give you some Machiavelli on this one. So he's the founding father of political science, and he talked about motivating people with fear, love and hate. And he's talking about, in the prints, He's princess and he says, he just says, forget about love because you can't make people like you. You can do everything. People still don't like you. And he's a big man and saying, make them inferior because you can really motivate people. But he says, don't make them hate you. If they hate you, they will fight you. Well, if you're running around serially spinning your allies in the face, they are going to hate you.

1:46:34And it won't work out well. It's just a bad strategy. Don't do it. the clickbait of insulting someone who comes to your house. That's very temporary, but the hatred of it, or, and also other people viewing and going, this is what qualifies as American diplomacy. Those memories are long term. It's unwise. Are you getting from some audience questions? Sure. Okay, anonymous asks. Anonymous brave person. What is a good grant strategy for minor power that wants the status quo to continue. For example, President South Korea probably does not want China and the U .S. fighting over Taiwan. It's allies and alliance systems.

1:47:17It's a smaller power has been tremendously influential in the rules -based order on how it's developed. In fact, they've provided some of the really good ideas over the years. So it's cooperate because if you have allies, this is what the United States doesn't get. Yeah, we're big. But if we're going after everybody else, they're bigger. So if you're small, and this is how Europe is important, no small countries or medium countries, but when they get together, they get powerful. When they add in Japan, they got equivalent GNP of us. And then you start adding other people in and they're bigger.

1:47:55And yes, it takes a long time to negotiate whatever the agreement is going to be, but once you agree, it's powerful. And so that's the answer. This is how we have as much of a rules -based order as we do, which allows everyone in the audience to take a little piece of plastic called a credit card, go to any country in the world pretty much, I wouldn't go to North Korea, but most countries. And you use that credit card, and if it says you have enough money to buy Mercedes, and there's a Mercedes in the shop, the chances are the credit card to go through, and you can buy your Mercedes. And it's just piece of plastic, but this is the rules -based order that most of us are into, and it's because we agree with each other on these things.

1:48:36Denny Trimkev asks, what made Japan a more fertile ground for Western ideas than China? Was China just too big for meaningful institutional change in the same time scale? This is my guess, because who knows? But I think it's China suffering from the incredible success of its civilization. It had been the dominant civilization of Asia forever and ever for excellent reasons. I mean, if you look at the achievements of China, they're amazing. And for Japan, it had always been in China's shadow, and the Japanese had always tried to learn from others. The Chinese also learned from others. A lot of their institutions come from the man -choose, but they pretend that we signify these people.

1:49:19And so they're actually Han Chinese achievements. Well, not so much, actually. But the myth lives on that anything that's worth knowing emanates from China while hubris, right? This is a human condition and the Chinese get a fatal case. And the argument, what I'm wondering about is whether this country has got a fatal case right now. We know everything we can do, everything. We don't work out so well. This leads in very nicely to the next question. Lydia Dean asks, in the spirit of the Meiji delegates sending out to explicitly study the West, where would the United States do well to send delegates today?

1:49:53Okay. Dalek's today, our allies. And it started by apologizing to them. That would be step one. I can't say that ever happening. But yeah, it's used these, we have all these international organizations use them. We're in the process of firing the State Department. I believe when WikiLeaks leaked a lot of their memos and things and the New York Times was reporting on it. I believe that what it revealed is incredibly accurate reporting of whatever place they were assigned to and describing things and really accurate detail that would enable U .S. policy makers then to make an accurate assessment and determine to do what's next.

1:50:43But that's not what we're doing. This was actually a very interesting take you gave to me offline ones, which is that the wiki leaks leaks of the state department documents you're like, oh wow, they're kind of on it. These like these seem like good memos. Well, I'm technically wasn't allowed to read them because they were classified and I was working for the Navy. So I didn't go out of my way to read them, but I'm reading the New York Times and other things. It's reporting on them. And from what's there, you just see it's accurate and it's in -depth reporting and of course we're angry that they're all out there because it's revealing who's talking to whom and whatever.

1:51:23But what it showed is a very professional staff and I don't know why we got some acts to grind with the State Department. It's also really tiny working at the War College on student solutions to the world's problems. And they would always say, quadruple the State Department's budget, because it's really tiny compared to the military budget, because there's an understanding that what much of the US government does, if it's doing what it's supposed to, is it's preventing catastrophes. So if you're sending your State Department out there, you're trying to prevent, oh, like an Indo -Pakistani nuclear war, and we've sent diplomats at different times to prevent that from happening.

1:52:07and who knows why it didn't happen, maybe it wasn't the State Department, but all over the world trying to prevent these things. Or if you think about the government, it's about setting all these standards for vent disasters. Like, I've talked to you offline, so it's gonna be repetitive for you. But like, you immunize people to prevent disease. Can I prove who didn't get what? No, I can't. I can talk about people who got bad reactions to it. But then there's a failure to understand the other of these some bad reactions, but let's look at the much greater number people who are alive in our own day.

1:52:38And earlier when Roosevelt was a president Roosevelt had polio and people were scared to death of getting polio, they understood about the importance of these things and everyone was lining up to get the polio vaccine when Dr. Sock invented it. And there are other things like having enough meteorologists to predict storms and so you can get people out of summer camps when you need to get the people out of summer camps and having appropriate spending the government funds to have the appropriate sirens and things. And what people aren't looking at, they're looking at the expense of doing these things and saying, if they're preventing disasters and people, it's the negative objectives.

1:53:18So you can't measure the things that fail to happen, but I assure you, a verdict a cat, a disaster for your saving a lot, probably a lot more than whatever you're spending on the budget. And I get it, The U .S. government needs to be much more efficient, I get it. But tearing the whole space down is going to be a mistake, and we will get more catastrophes. All right, next month we're doing a podcast with the UNIALAN together. Oh, UNIALAN? Oh, lucky me. Oh, well, that's a whole other thing. There are... Maybe we should say that for the next lecture. Yeah, okay. Oh, yes. Yes, the different varieties of American hubris.

1:53:52Yes. Oh. We're going to Sam Francisco, Sarah. Well, one variant of a hubris A is I'm an American. I don't need to consult any other country. And it's just whatever Washington does or doesn't do. That determines how the world works. It's half -quart tennis, it ignores what the other team is doing, and it doesn't work out well. And then there's a Silicon Valley or whatever it is. It's a different variant. It's what I call type two hubris. It's incredibly talented in one area, which he is, gottably talented, or whatever he's made himself a household word, not everyone can do that. But you're thinking because I'm good at one thing, this is transferable to everything else.

1:54:35Well, okay, I got news. There's all kinds of expertise, and it's important. But if I take a really good hairdresser and make them an automacanic or the automacanic, a hairdresser, it is not going to work out well. So you have to line these things up correctly. And this type to hubris is thinking, oh, I'm smart at one thing, and therefore I can do everything. And these people are making decisions in areas where they have no expertise, and it will not work out well. Great place to close. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, the most helpful thing you can do is just share it with other people who you think might enjoy it.

1:55:12Send it to your friends, your group chats, Twitter, wherever else. Just let the word go forth. other than that, super helpful if you can subscribe on YouTube and leave a FI star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Check out the sponsors in the description below. If you want to sponsor a future episode, go to doarkesh .com slash advertise. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you on the next one.